Scale-up scheme to offer businesses in the West funding and support from leading experts

New programme from UWE, Natwest and Foot Anstey will bring expert support and advice to WoE businesses

20th November 2018

S4G (Scale Up 4 Growth), a brand new programme that launches today, brings together experts from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), NatWest and law firm Foot Anstey, to deliver grant funding and relevant, high quality support and training to West of England businesses with ambitious growth plans.

The scheme is open to businesses in any sector that want to grow and scale up their business. Applicants must be small or medium-sized enterprises and based in Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset or South Gloucestershire.

Grants of £10,000 to £40,000 are available to help address the challenges that West of England businesses face when growing and scaling up their operations. The grants will cover 37.5% of growth projects’ costs.

From January, leadership and business experts from UWE Bristol, as well as legal and finance professionals from Foot Anstey and NatWest will conduct a series of fully funded workshops and provide targeted support through one-to-one sessions. These workshops and one-to-ones will help businesses address the challenges they face in growing or ‘scaling up’, such as how to increase leadership capacity, finding a talented workforce, increasing sales, expanding infrastructure and accessing finance.

Robin Halpenny, who leads the S4G programme at UWE Bristol said: “S4G is an exciting and unique offering for businesses, as it is rare to find a scheme that offers one-to-one sessions from experts combined with workshops, as well as the option to get funding in order to grow.”

Professor Martin Boddy, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise at UWE Bristol, said: “The scheme aims to stimulate the regional economy by helping successful, fast-growth companies in the West of England make that next step up, to realise their full potential and overcome the barriers to getting on to that next rung of the ladder in terms of growth.”

Matt Hatcher, NatWest Director of Commercial Banking in the South West, said: “NatWest runs the largest fully funded accelerator programme in the world and over the last three years more than 5,000 entrepreneurs have been supported by one of our 12 regional Entrepreneur Accelerators to grow and scale-up their businesses.

“In the South West this year, we’ve provided funding of nearly £3bn to SMEs and S4G is a perfect fit with the development of our scale-up proposition, which aims to help even more local companies. The partnership allows us to reach more businesses across the region so we can support them with the funding and sector-specific help then need to grow their business.”

Our team can provide insights and the right level of legal expertise across a whole range of areas to businesses when they need it.”

S4G launches on 15th November 2018 and will run until 2021. For more information and to submit an application for the scheme, please visit www.scaleup4growth.co.uk